Is there a bridge between teacher acceptance and student acceptance when considering computers and writing theory? For instance, students sometimes have a hard time with what you call 'rules on the fly' [in Datacloud] when it comes to alternative composition assignments. How can educators bridge the gap of what is considered 'composition' to the student?
Actually, I'd flip this. In my experiences, students love to work on these other things: websites, videos, cellphone games, flyers, childrens' books. I think the reason I'm more affiliated with technical communication than composition is that TC allows me to work with students on an enormous range of documents that would be more problematic in a composition program. (I'm not alone in this, even among compositionists: look at all the comp teachers working with videogames, documentary video, Flash-based texts, etc. They're on the margins, but they're leaning forward into the future, as Bruce Sterling says.)
Anyway, you asked about the bridge, and about 'rules on the fly.' Those rules have always been a sticking point for us, especially since comp teachers moved away from red pens and 2% for each grammatical error.
How can a teacher legitimately assign 'experimentation' (perhaps with a new tool) and call it composition?
All composition is experimentation. So even in a 'traditional' environment, using familiar tools, we're testing out our assumptions and theories about how readers and users will take up and transform our texts in use. So experimentation, even when it's at the functional level (the 'hello, world' statement again) is useful. At some point, ideally early on, people need to start moving beyond that. But such experimentation will always have a role in communication technologies.
IT'S A GOOD THING.
Tell me about some different experiences you've have with student ideology about computers and writing in terms of composition pedagogy.
One useful aspect of computers has been the increase in the amount of written communication and increasingly, multimedia that students are now willing to do, compared to earlier generations that relied on handwritten and typed texts. Students (and people in general) not only produce more texts overall, they also are (somewhat) more willing to revise them. At the same time, to some extent, there's been a loss of awareness that different rhetorical contexts require different types of communication. The massive backlash against Instant Messenger by many composition traditionalists is related to this: students importing IM techniques into rhetorical situations where they don't fit well. But that doesn't make IM evil; it just requires teachers to use the situation as a teachable moment, a way to discuss different rhetorical needs and strategies.